recipes

Why August is the best month to be a “freegan”

No doubt about it, August is the best month to practice freeganism. Sure, any time of year you can help yourself to the odd morsel of unlucky roadside raccoon (extra points if you bag-and-barbecue the one that clawed its way through our neighbor’s swimming pool). But even better than already-dead varmints are yummy blackberries.

Not even hard-drinking bears who eschew solid food can resist blackberries. The way they burst forth every August with their ravishing aroma…free for the taking for anyone willing to piss off a few spiders—ahhhhhh!

My cheap-ass mother swears things taste better when they’re free, and she might be right about blackberries, if not raccoons.

The berries are calling out to be taken. Today the kids put up with a whole 15 minutes of picking before crying boredom, which gave us (as it happened) half a liquor-store shopping bag of the wondrous little fruits. What shall we do with them, my fellow inebriates?

Citrus Blackberry Collins

We need citrus vodka and blackberry liqueur for this concoction. Odds my parents will do it? 4,143:1 against

Blackberry Crush

Once again, this calls for vodka. Odds? 853:1 against

Blackberry Cocktail

Photo: Jim Franco
Styling: Scott Martin

This calls for gin, which we have, although my mum is causing it to disappear. Even if there is any left by the time we get mixing, the recipe’s weirder ingredients (cucumber with mint) may freak my unadventurous parents out. Odds? 548:1 against

Blackberry Caipirinha

A long time ago a liquor representative emailed a tantalizing invitation to taste Cachaca, one of this recipe’s main ingredients. By all means, send it, I said, but alas, it’s not simple to send booze to Canada, and the hooch never materialized. Odds? Sigh.

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Screw it. My mum can make muffins or whatever the hell she wants to throw those blackberries into, and I’ll have a gin & tonic (before she takes it all).

Strawberry Shortcake Day? Is this, like, a thing?

My Fellow Inebriates,

I had no idea June 14 was Strawberry Shortcake Day until I looked at the stats today and saw that 53 people had found me via that search term. (Of course they would have been annoyed to find a not-so-PG-rated FRÜLI review, but oh well.)

Thankfully Strawberry Shortcake isn’t especially popular at LBHQ. (Wish we could say the same for Wonder Pets.) Judging by the number of people who somehow find this (this!) site by questing after that sugary, insipid, fruit-obsessed character with the disproportionately large head, there are plenty of parents out there enduring a pre-K Strawberry Shortcake plague and evidently obliging their tots by typing it in as a search term.

She might actually be less tolerable than a Care Bear. One thing’s for sure: there are better uses for strawberries than ordinary shortcake. How about a Boozy Strawberry Shortcake?

Photo: Stephanie Diaz

Okay, so I’m not a big solids fan, but a dessert laced with cointreau is cause for exception. Let’s get started. Do you also have a four-year-old helping you? All right, then. You might want to take a belt of cointreau now rather than later.

Start with five to six strawberries. The ones they ship up to us from California are mutants the size of apples, so I’ll use five. You have to hull them and slice them, then soak them in 1 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp cointreau.

This last bit must be a misprint—we’ll use 2 cups.

While these things are sitting, whip up some cream, adding some of the strawberry liquid. (Holy shit, that’s a lot of liquid if you follow my directions.)

Then you need to make the shortcake part, which involves a lot of measuring and kneading and baking, etc. Maybe we’ll leave this part out.

Depending on how drunk you are, assembly may or may not challenge you. There are three things to layer, two of which are supposed to be solid. If you’ve been liberal with the cointreau and jettisoned the shortcake step, you won’t be able to layer this while sober, never mind sky-high drunk like yours truly.

So just throw all those cointreau-soaked strawberries into the whipped cream and enjoy. Happy Strawberry Shortcake Day 🙂

And if you don’t have a four-year-old to impress, just cut to the chase with a Strawberry Shortcake Martini.

Banana schnapps it ain’t—P’s amoxicillin tastes like ass

My Fellow Inebriates,

What would YOU do if you woke up and found this on the breakfast table?

Damn straight, I slammed that shooter back.

Only it wasn’t a shooter. It was Miss P’s amoxicillin.

While I was retching…

Mum: P, you took your medicine already! I didn’t even have to ask you. Good job!

Innocent smile from P.

LB: WTF was that? OMG, that was the worst shooter I ever had!

Mum: Amoxicillin. P, did you take this medicine?

V: Mummy, what’s LB doing? Silly LB! Is LB throwing up?

Mum: P, did you give your medicine to LB?

P: No.

This was true.

Mum: So you just shot this back, LB? Dude.

LB: What the hell was in that? OMG, seriously, you’re making P take this 21 times?

Mum: Well, 20 now, since you’ve taken one of them.

P: I don’t mind sharing.

LB: Holy shit, what flavor is that supposed to be? That wasn’t like any shooter at any bar that I’ve ever had ever! OMG!

V: It’s banana, yellow banana.

LB: OMFG! So will it at least give me a buzz?

Mum: No. All it will do is alert any bad microbes you have of amoxicillin’s antimicrobial properties, enabling them to develop resistance and evolve into a stronger strain. So thanks for nothing, buddy.

But P was clearly happy yours truly had taken the bullet. Even though she still had to take another dose, she was that much closer to the end of the bottle.

After a nasty experience like this morning’s, I need a proper banana shooter.